Billed as "the electrifying first novel of the Companions on Earth," Fred Saberhagen's Earth: Final Conflict TV tie-in novel The Arrival fails to generate much more than the occasional burst of static.

The story begins the night the Taelons arrive on Earth. Much to the surprise of billionaire industrialist Jonathan Doors, a Companion shuttle lands in his apple orchard and the alien called Namor almost immediately sets about treating Amanda Doors' cystic fibrosis.

Meanwhile, another Taelon, Va'lon, demonstrates an interest in human antiquities, specifically those housed at San Simeon, the former playground of publisher William Randolph Hearst. Doors, who in an apparent coincidence has recently purchased the property, agrees to give the alien a tour.

However, that earlier mission to San Simeon failed, and Jubal believes that the aliens now want to buy the estate in order to complete their original assignment and smuggle their sleeping enemy off the planet.

Fortified with these new insights, Doors resists when the aliens insist on taking his wife off-planet, instead laying the groundwork for his future activities as leader of the anti-Taelon Resistance.

Confessions of a syndicated TV rebel
While the first-contact setting makes The Arrival accessible to readers who've never seen an episode of Earth: Final Conflict, Saberhagen doesn't stay faithful enough to the television series to justify the book's inclusion into E:FC canon.

Within the context of Earth: Final Conflict, The Arrival charts the evolution of Jonathan Doors' revolt against the seemingly benign aliens. Even then, Saberhagen doesn't chronicle the birth of the Resistance, but instead focuses on how a man like Jonathan Doors adopts rebellion as the appropriate response to the Taelon presence on Earth.

The problem with making Jonathan Doors the focus of the novel is that he is the least developed character on Earth: Final Conflict. A schemer and an ideologue, Doors is too much of a cipher to fans of the series to carry the story.

Seemingly aware that Doors is too cryptic a character to build an entire novel around, Saberhagen has given fully half the book over to Jubal Doors' 1936 encounter with the aliens.

While Jonathan Doors is a poor print ambassador for Earth: Final Conflict, he is at least a seminal figure in the series' mythology. Jubal Doors, on the other hand, is a totally unknown entity, and readers may find it difficult to care about him or his adventures.

Who are all these people?
The rest of the cast is similarly unexceptional. Saberhagen surrounds Doors with characters that we will obviously never see again because they are not part of the Resistance leader's life in the time period covered in the television series. Readers who watch the show will know that these characters are doomed to leave the stage before the book ends.

While this trail of tragedy that transforms Doors from innocent industrialist to revolutionary leader may justify his hatred of the Taelons in the series, it does little to develop or enhance him as a character. Even accounting for the staggering personal losses that mold him in the novel, the Jonathan Doors of The Arrival bears little to no resemblance to his broadcast counterpart.

Problems of character aside, the novel is interminably slow-paced even by the plodding standards of much franchise fiction. Not only do the "action" sequences drag on without successfully communicating any sense of danger or urgency, but even Jubal and Jonathan Doors seem strangely detached from the situations in which they find themselves.

All in all, The Arrival seems to have too tenuous a connection to the television series it was intended to support to hold the interest of E:FC fans. Beyond that, it's little more than a run-of-the-mill first-contact story.

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